I'm including a lot of information here in an attempt to prove I'm not being cheesy in suggesting a book about lesbians :) This is a truly great book a "classic", Beautifully written, incredibly insightful, and deeply moving. It has remained in print almost continuously and remains today as wonderful as when it was written. So I highly recommend. *grin*

From Wikipedia
"Desert of the Heart is a 1964 lesbian-themed novel written by Jane Rule. The story was adapted loosely into the 1985 film Desert Hearts, directed by Donna Deitch. The book was originally published in hardback by Macmillan Canada. It was one of the very few novels that addressed lesbianism that was published in hardback form; most books during this period with female homosexuality as a topic were considered lesbian pulp fiction until 1969.
At the time the novel was published, Rule was a lecturer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and because the novel dealt with lesbianism, her job was threatened."

T. Fessenden's view
"My most immediate subject is realist writer Jane Rule's Desert of the heart, which I read as a lesbian revision of Bunyan's The Pigrim's Progress, Rule's novel offers not only an explicit critigue of The Pigrim's Progress's representation of female Bildung, but, largely by retrieving Bunyan's paradigms of progress, also effects a cautionary allegory for Anglo-American culture's constructions of gender, genre, and sexuality.......Rule's work is a latter-day pilgrim's progress that subverts the tradition of realist literature shaped by Bunyan, Milton and the Bible"

page: 239 : The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature / T. Fessenden

I just finished _Reading Lolita in Tehran_ (which, incidentally, is delicately and masterfully written, and includes some insightful literary criticism along with a heart-wrenching and cautionary portrait of what life is like for a secular person under a government in the grip of religious extremists) which has piqued my interest in reading *something* by Nabokov. Lolita is at the top of my list, if I can find a copy at the local library.

Now that I think of it, though, I think that _Reading Lolita in Tehran_ would be an excellent book for us to read and discuss. It's a little bit lighter fare (than Nabokov, but I'm not sure that that is saying much), but I think the potential for participation is a bit higher.

I had exactly the same question. My personal answer: google "classical literature", whatever pops up as classical literature is a classic. :P

The thing with classics is that most of them we've all read at some point or another. I'd like to reread Dune or Lolita (please don't make me reread Gilgamesh lol), but I'd rather read something I've never read before.